A wedding and countless funerals: scenes from Gaza’s ceasefire

On November 26th Majed al-Durra took advantage of the pause in fighting in Gaza to marry his fiancée. A crowd of thousands cheered him after the ceremony was performed in a concrete United Nations school compound in central Gaza. The school yard rang with drumming and joyful chants. The compound has become home to people from all over the strip who have fled from Israeli bombardments.

The war, triggered by Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis (mostly civilians) on October 7th, has been the most destructive that Gaza has ever seen. More than 14,000 people have been killed in roughly 50 days of fighting, according to the Gaza Media Office, more than a third of them children. Israel has cut off electricity to the territory and dramatically reduced the water supply.

Al-Durra, 23, had been planning a more conventional wedding: extended family, a henna party for the women, good food. His fiancée, Sarah Abu Toha, dreamed of wearing a white dress with elaborate embellishments. In the end she wore a black prayer gown. Their honeymoon was spent in a classroom. “It never occurred to us that we would get married like this, but this is war,” said al-Durra. “We will escape from war for times of joy.” The couple plan to have a proper wedding if they survive.

Adeeb, a 30-year-old freelance photographer, was also engaged when the war started. He loved spending his weekends visiting his fiancée and her family. When the bombardments began they were both forced to flee to different parts of Gaza. He tried to call his fiancée many times but her phone was switched off. For more than five weeks he didn’t know if she was alive or dead. It wasn’t until the first day of the ceasefire that he was able to track down one of her relatives, who told him that she had survived, and brought Adeeb to see her.

Alaa al-Qaseem, 27, took the opportunity granted by the ceasefire to reacquaint herself with something close to her heart: the sea. During the fighting her nose and throat had been filled with the smell of war, and she became ill from drinking contaminated water. She longed for the bracing, salty air of the Mediterranean. She knew she might die when the fighting started again, she told me, “so I decided to bid farewell to my friend, whom I had been separated from for 50 days.”

But her journey to the beach didn’t provide the escape she’d hoped for. “I did not expect all this destruction,” she said. “When I was walking down the street, it felt as if an earthquake had struck the area.”

Many people did not find out what had happened to their own homes, and their own families, until the ceasefire started. Muhammad al-Zayat went to work in a hospital in the northern Gaza strip after the bombardment began. After the ceasefire he went to visit his uncle’s house in Jabalia refugee camp. It was completely destroyed. He asked some of the neighbours if they knew where his uncle and cousins were: they told him their bodies were still under the rubble. He pulled them out on Monday. “This war is abhorrent. It has killed everything in us. It must stop, and quickly,” he said. “We do not want a temporary ceasefire. We want to live again. I am afraid of loss.”

Not everyone has been able to return home. Bilal Masoud, 28, had been forced to flee from his home in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the strip, when the war started. He and 30 members of his family were stranded without basic provisions, so when the ceasefire was announced he decided to go back to his house to get supplies. As he approached an Israeli military checkpoint that had been set up on the road to northern Gaza. he was met with a barrage of bullets. He doesn’t know where the shots came from, but says two people were killed. He won’t make another attempt to reach his house.

It’s not clear how much longer the ceasefire will last. It is due to end on Wednesday evening but Hamas still holds a number of Israeli civilian hostages. Their fate is currently subject to intense negotiations.

Some Palestinians may find the next round of fighting harder to endure than the previous one, now that they have seen with their own eyes the scale of destruction. “The city of Beit Hanoun has turned into a real ghost town,” said Youssef Fares, a journalist. “Everything here was completely destroyed. The houses are uninhabitable, and there is no electricity or sewage networks. Life here has become impossible.”

When he described what he witnessed in the first hours of the ceasefire, Fares broke down in tears. At the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, staff had been so overwhelmed by dead bodies that they’d been forced to stack them in the hallway. Fares said he had seen stray dogs eating the corpses. “I will never forget the scenes,” he told me. “Four days, and perhaps four years, will not be enough to return Gaza to what it was before the war.” ■

Hajar Harb is a journalist from Gaza

IMAGES: GETTY IMAGES, Zuma Press / eyevine